Six songs, nearly sixty minutes of distressingly slow and heavy music – it is no surprise that with an album like ‘Misery Wizard’, Pilgrim are already being compared to the masters of the macabre Candlemass with this monstrously heavy slab of pure metal already firmly under their collective belts. “This record is no place for a hobbit” warns the album sleeve – we’re inclined to agree.
To back up just a touch, Pilgrim are a trio of Sabbath worshipping gentlemen from Rhode Island in the USA who are signed to Alan Nemtheanga’s Poison Tongue imprint, an offshoot of the mighty Metal Blade Records. ‘Misery Wizard’ is the band’s debut album and as the track-listing-to-running-time-ratio might suggest the songs move at roughly the pace of evolution, although the process is almost as fascinating.
The album opens with ‘Astaroth’, a song powered by a monumentally slow, corrosive riff that brings to mind the mighty Sabbath as well as seminal acts such as Sleep and Candlemass. It takes nearly three minutes for vocals in any form to appear, and when they do they are a massed Gregorian-style harmony that fits perfectly in with the epic nature of the riffs that dominate the song. As for lyrics – well they take nearly four minutes to appear, but when they do it transpires that The Wizard (responsible for guitars and vocals) has a fine voice indeed, eschewing the more overt theatrics of Rob Lowe and opting, instead, for a pleasing baritone that perfectly complements the music. The music, meanwhile, doesn’t break out of its hypnotic pace, the tempo that of a forced death march, the simple effort of placing one leg in front of another a searing pain that leads to nothing but oblivion in the final analysis, but somehow it is essential to do so anyhow. The title track doesn’t see the pace pick up (and indeed it rarely does over the entire, hope-sapping length of the album) and, if anything, the opening riff is even slower, even more ground out than its predecessor. And yet, for all that the music is tortuously slow, you can’t help but feel elated whilst listening to it. In many ways this is the album Reverend Bizarre should have made, the tempo kept deliberately minimalist and thus seeking to break down the listener’s will by a process of attrition, the mountainous riffs Vs your ability to resist such an ominous onslaught, whilst the drums in the deep pound out their relentless tattoo, never pausing to spare your sanity for even a moment.
…And so, a mere two songs in, you’re liable to have formed your opinion of ‘misery Wizard’ – you will either be entranced by the band’s terrifying depths of self-discipline in maintaining such a leaden pace, or utterly disheartened and disgusted by the whole affair. This is doom pushed to its limits, stripped of the romanticism of My Dying Bride, the gothic nuances of Paradise Lost or the humour of Type O Negative and exposed, at its blackened core, as an earth-shakingly powerful, single-minded entity capable of blacking out the stars and blotting out the very light of existence which we need to survive.
Assuming you do make it beyond that opening gambit, then you will be greeted by ‘quest’, a song which despite its somnambulant tempo somehow feels marginally lighter than the previous two tracks with its tale of treasure hunting , magic and battles, the latter represented by a sudden surge in tempo and an adrenalin-charged solo that sees the band break their own self-imposed restrictions and let fly with all the force that you can imagine emanating from a band who play like the love children of Tony Iommi and Messiah Marcolin. ‘Masters of the sky’ opens with a simple, sludge progression, the guitars droning over percussion that has surely been frozen in carbonite before, some two minutes in, the song suddenly changes shape and becomes even slower and stripped right back to a simple guitar chiming out over feedback before introducing the main body of the track – The Wizard conducting necromancy whilst Krolg Splinterfist, slayer of man batters his drums into submission and Count Elric the soothsayer unleashes the sort of low-end frequencies that make you worry they may have found the fabled ‘brown note’. The song ends in a storm of feedback and dread before the band unleash ‘Adventurer’, a rare and powerful sprint over unfamiliar territory, the pace picking up through the works of Tolkien and folk-tales, with The Wizard once again demonstrating his fine vocals over a musical backdrop that is as fresh and exciting as the stories depicted within the song. That simply leaves the feedback strewn ‘forsaken man’ to round out this none-more-black sludge-doom masterpiece with a slice of oppressive metal so utterly unforgiving it simply eclipses the rest of the album, coating everything in a sticky shroud of darkness and despondency that refuses to lift even after the album has stopped spinning. It is an awesome ending to an album that never fails to impress with its utter dedication and conviction, not to mention the band’s fine musical skills with the highlight being The Wizard’s mighty voice – an instrument truly made for doom if ever there was one.
Having lived with ‘Misery Wizard’ for some time it is safe to say that it is a mighty fine album. For sure the pace is largely that of tectonic plates colliding, but those rare glimpses of fire (the latter half of ‘Quest’ and ‘Adventurer’) both conspire to add variety and colour to the band’s monochromatic fury. This is doom stripped to its most basic roots, the flourishes and touches added by other bands torn away for fear of contaminating the source, and it is played with a single-minded determination that inspires envy and admiration in equal measure. Hope-sapping, as black at night in places, it is clearly not an album for the faint of heart, but for those who like their doom taken to extremes this will prove to be the poisoned chalice of choice for months to come. In ‘misery Wizard’ Pilgrim have created a doom masterpiece, nothing more and nothing less.
